Before she could die at home where she belonged,
they took her to St Margaret’s hospital
and put her in a room above the town,
first snow at the glass, the buses
heading out to Crossgates and Lumphinnans,
those silver lights below me, where I peered
from breath-fogged windows in the corridor,
waiting to take my turn, three walls away
and her in the high bed, under a plain white sheet,
yellowed and cold, while her grandchildren came, one by one,
to say their goodbyes.
I remember my uncle David leading me in
to kiss her, the skin of her face
dry as old beech leaves, the smell of her sweet and dark
through the lavender talc.
Seven years old, I thought I would see her again,
though I knew she was dying,
for this was a ritual, emotional legalese,
like refusing the last slice of cake, or writing
thank you cards.
For as long as I’d lived,
I had gone to her house once a month
with my mother and sister
to sit by the fire, drinking squash,
her smiling as if it were funny, when she told
how her father had walked all the way
from Ennis to Dublin,
children in tow, her mother always
pregnant, or so it seemed,
then northwards by boat and train, through a rumour
of heathland and loch, a rumour that passed in the dark
till they set down at Cowdenbeath,
sectarian, ugly, and no reason not to move on
beyond fatigue.
But that was our home, she said, by which she meant
that the harder it is to begin with, the prouder we are
to a call a place our own, as she had done
by making a garden of sorts from the pit town’s
clinker and soot, her flowerbeds
thick with bees, the housefront
covered with climbing roses, a may hedge
screening it all from the road, and a constant
riot of sparrows, safe from the neighbours’ cats,
all squabble and jeer
in the scribbles of shadow and thorn.
What she loved most, I think,
was variegation,
hairstreak, the broken line, the not quite
finished of the moments as they tumbled
one into the next
and never stopped.
Nothing defined, the world
all guesswork: birds,
then shadows, cold rain
spooling through the porch light when she went
to fetch the coal.
I think back and now it’s gone, the rumour of heathland
sold to the lowest bidder, the rain
commoditised, a thousand tribes of bees
lost in the haze
of neonicotine.
I kissed her and said goodbye – I’m saying it still –
not quite convinced that anyone can cease
and as I turn to go
her face is lit
from somewhere I can’t make out, not the lamp in the room
or the lights from the buses below, as they make their way
to Perth and Glenrothes, Kirkcaldy,
the Bow of Fife.